A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

(#litres_trial_promo) By December the paper’s headline read, “MILLION ARMENIANS KILLED OR IN EXILE.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The number of victims were estimates, as the bodies were impossible to count. Nevertheless, governmental and nongovernmental officials were sure that the atrocities were “unparalleled in modern times” and that the Turks had set out to achieve “nothing more or less than the annihilation of a whole people.”

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Witnesses to the terror knew that American readers would have difficulty processing such gruesome horrors, so they scoured history for parallels to events that they believed had already been processed in the public mind. One report said, “The nature and scale of the atrocities dwarf anything perpetrated…under Abdul Hamid, whose exploits in this direction now assume an aspect of moderation compared with those of the present Governors of Turkey.” Before Adolf Hitler, the standard for European brutality had been set by Abdul Hamid and the Belgian king Leopold, who pillaged the Congo for rubber in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Because the Turks continued to block access to the caravans, reporters often speculated on whether their sources were reliable. “The Turkish Government has succeeded in throwing an impenetrable veil over its actions toward all Armenians,” a frustrated Associated Press correspondent noted. “Constantinople has for weeks had its daily crop of Armenian rumors…What has happened…is still an unwritten chapter. No newspapermen are allowed to visit the affected districts and reports from these are altogether unreliable. The reticence of the Turkish Government cannot be looked upon as a good sign, however.”

(#litres_trial_promo)Turkish representatives in the United States predictably blurred the picture with denials and defenses. The Turkish consul,Djelal Munif Bey, told the New York Times, “All those who have been killed were of that rebellious element who were caught red-handed or while otherwise committing traitorous acts against the Turkish Government, and not women and children, as some of these fabricated reports would have the Americans believe.” But the same representative added that if innocent lives had in fact been lost, that was because in wartime “discrimination is utterly impossible, and it is not alone the offender who suffers the penalty of his act, but also the innocent whom he drags with him…The Armenians have only themselves to blame.”

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The Turks, who had attempted to conduct the massacres secretly, were unhappy about the attention they were getting. In November 1915 Talaat advised the authorities in Aleppo that Morgenthau knew far too much. “It is important that foreigners who are in those parts shall be persuaded that the expulsion of the Armenians is in truth only deportation,” Talaat wrote. “It is important that, to save appearances, a show of gentle dealing shall be made for a time, and the usual measures be taken in suitable places.” A month later, angry that foreigners had obtained photographs of corpses along the road, Talaat recommended that these corpses be “buried at once,” or at least hidden from view.

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Sensing Turkish sensitivity to the outside world’s opinion, Morgenthau pleaded with his superiors to throw protocol and neutrality aside and to issue a direct government-to-government appeal “on behalf of humanity” to stop the killings. He also urged the United States to convince the German kaiser to stop the Turks’ “annihilation of a Christian race.” And he called on Washington to press the Turks to allow humanitarian aid deliveries to those Armenians already deported and in danger of starving to death in the desert.

(#litres_trial_promo) But because Americans were not endangered by the Turkish horrors and because American neutrality in World War I remained fixed, Washington did not act on Morgenthau’s recommendations. Officials urged him instead to seek aid from private sources.

Morgenthau did get help from outside the U.S. government. The Congregationalist, Baptist, and Roman Catholic churches made donations. The Rockefeller foundation gave $290,000 in 1915 alone. And most notable, a number of distinguished Americans, none of Armenian descent, set up a new Committee on Armenian Atrocities.

(#litres_trial_promo) The committee raised $100,000 for Armenian relief and staged high-profile rallies, gathering delegations from more than 1,000 churches and religious organizations in New York City to join in denouncing the Turkish crimes.

But in calling for “action,” the committee was not urging U.S. military intervention. It was worried about the impact of an American declaration of war on American schools and churches in Turkey. In addition, the sentiment that made committee members empathize with their fellow Christians in Armenia also made some pacifists. In decrying the atrocities but opposing the war against Turkey, the committee earned the scorn of former president Theodore Roosevelt. In a letter to Samuel Dutton, the Armenia committee secretary, Roosevelt slammed the hypocrisy of the “peace-at-any-price type” who acted on the motto of “safety first,” which, he wrote, “could be appropriately used by the men on a sinking steamer who jump into boats ahead of the women and children.” He continued:

Mass meetings on behalf of the Armenians amount to nothing whatever if they are mere methods of giving a sentimental but ineffective and safe outlet to the emotion of those engaged in them. Indeed they amount to less than nothing…Until we put honor and duty first, and are willing to risk something in order to achieve righteousness both for ourselves and for others, we shall accomplish nothing; and we shall earn and deserve the contempt of the strong nations of mankind.

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Roosevelt wondered how anyone could possibly advise neutrality “between despairing and hunted people, people whose little children are murdered and their women raped, and the victorious and evil wrongdoers.” He observed that such a position put “safety in the present above both duty in the present and safety in the future.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Roosevelt would grow even angrier later in the war, when the very relief campaign initiated to aid the Armenians would be invoked as reason not to make war on Turkey. In 1918 he wrote to Cleveland Dodge, the most influential member of the Armenia committee: “To allow the Turks to massacre the Armenians and then solicit permission to help the survivors and then to allege the fact that we are helping the survivors as a reason why we should not follow the only policy that will permanently put a stop to such massacres is both foolish and odious.”

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Morgenthau tried to work around America’s determined neutrality. In September 1915 he offered to raise $1 million to transport to the United States the Armenians who had escaped the massacres. “Since May,” Morgenthau said, “350,000 Armenians have been slaughtered or have died of starvation. There are 550,000 Armenians who could now be sent to America, and we need help to save them.” Turkey accepted the proposal, and Morgenthau called upon each of the states in the western United States to raise funds to equip a ship to transport and care for Armenian refugees. He appealed to American self-interest, arguing, “The Armenians are a moral, hard working race, and would make good citizens to settle the less thickly populated parts of the Western States.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He knew he had to preemptively rebut those who expected Armenian freeloaders. But the Turks, insincere even about helping Armenians leave, blocked the exit of refugees. Morgenthau’s plan went nowhere.

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As American missionaries were driven out of Turkey, they returned to the United States with stories to tell. William A. Shedd, a Presbyterian missionary, chose to write directly to the new U.S. secretary of state, Robert Lansing:

I am sure there are a great many thoughtful Americans who, like myself, feel that silence on the part of our Government is perilous and that for our Government to make no public protest against a crime of such magnitude perpetrated by a Government on noncombatants, the great majority of them helpless women and children, is to miss an unusual opportunity to serve humanity, if not to risk grave danger of dishonor on the name of America and of lessening our right to speak for humanity and justice. I am aware, of course, that it may seem presumptuous to suggest procedure in matters of diplomacy; but the need of these multitudes of people suffering in Turkey is desperate, and the only hope of influence is the Government of the United States.

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But Lansing had been advised by the Division of Near East Affairs at the State Department that “however much we may deplore the suffering of the Armenians, we cannot take any active steps to come to their assistance at the present time.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Lansing instructed Morgenthau to continue telling the Turkish authorities that the atrocities would “jeopardize the good feeling of the people of the United States toward the people of Turkey.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Lansing also eventually asked Germany to try to restrain Turkey. But he expressed understanding for Turkey’s security concerns. “I could see that [the Armenians’] well-known disloyalty to the Ottoman Government and the fact that the territory which they inhabited was within the zone of military operations constituted grounds more or less justifiable for compelling them to depart their homes,” Secretary Lansing wrote in November 1916.

(#litres_trial_promo) Morgenthau examined the facts and saw a cold-blooded campaign of annihilation; Lansing processed many of those same facts and saw an unfortunate but understandable effort to quell an internal security threat.

After twenty-six months in Constantinople, Morgenthau left in early 1916. He could no longer stand his impotence. “My failure to stop the destruction of the Armenians,” he recalled, “had made Turkey for me a place of horror—I had reached the end of my resources.”

(#litres_trial_promo) More than 1 million Armenians had been killed on his watch. Morgenthau, who had earned a reputation as a loose cannon, did not receive another appointment in the Wilson administration. President Wilson, reflecting the overwhelming view of the American people, stayed on the sidelines of World War I as long as he could. And when the United States finally entered the conflict against Germany in April 1917, he refused to declare war on or even break off relations with the Ottoman Empire. “We shall go wherever the necessities of this war carry us,” Wilson told Congress, “but it seems to me that we should go only where immediate and practical considerations lead us and not heed any others.”

(#litres_trial_promo) In the end it was Turkey that broke off ties with the United States.

America’s nonresponse to the Turkish horrors established patterns that would be repeated. Time and again the U.S. government would be reluctant to cast aside its neutrality and formally denounce a fellow state for its atrocities. Time and again though U.S. officials would learn that huge numbers of civilians were being slaughtered, the impact of this knowledge would be blunted by their uncertainty about the facts and their rationalization that a firmer U.S. stand would make little difference. Time and again American assumptions and policies would be contested by Americans in the field closest to the slaughter, who would try to stir the imaginations of their political superiors. And time and again these advocates would fail to sway Washington. The United States would offer humanitarian aid to the survivors of “race murder” but would leave those committing it alone.

Aftermath

When the war ended in 1918, the question of war guilt loomed large at the Paris peace conference. Britain, France, and Russia urged that state authorities in Germany, Austria, and Turkey be held responsible for violations of the laws of war and the “laws of humanity.” They began planning the century’s first international war crimes tribunal, hoping to try the kaiser and his German underlings, as well as Talaat, Enver Pasha, and the other leading Turkish perpetrators. But Lansing dissented on behalf of the United States. In general the Wilson administration opposed the Allies’ proposals to emasculate Germany. But it also rejected the notion that some allegedly “universal” principle of justice should allow punishment. The laws of humanity, Lansing argued, “vary with the individual.” Reflecting the widespread view of the time, Lansing said that sovereign leaders should be immune from prosecution. “The essence of sovereignty,” he said, was “the absence of responsibility.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The United States could judge only those violations that were committed upon American persons or American property.

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If such a tribunal were set up, then, the United States would not participate. In American thinking at that time, there was little question that the state’s right to be left alone automatically trumped any individual right to justice. A growing postwar isolationism made the United States reluctant to entangle itself in affairs so clearly removed from America’s narrow national interests.

Even without official U.S. support, it initially seemed that Britain’s wartime pledge to try the Turkish leaders would be realized. In early 1919 the British, who still occupied Turkey with some 320,000 soldiers, pressured the cooperative sultan to arrest a number of Turkish executioners. Of the eight Ottoman leaders who led Turkey to war against the Allies, five were apprehended. In April 1919 the Turks set up a tribunal in Constantinople that convicted two senior district officials for deporting Armenians and acting “against humanity and civilization.” The Turkish court found that women and children had been brutally forced into deportation caravans and the men murdered: “They were premeditatedly,with intent, murdered, after the men had had their hands tied behind their backs.” The police commander Tevfik Bey was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor, and Lieutenant Governor Kemal Bey was hanged. The court also convicted Talaat and his partners in crime in absentia for their command responsibility in the slaughter, finding a top-down, carefully executed plan: “The disaster visiting the Armenians was not a local or isolated event. It was the result of a premeditated decision taken by a central body;…and the immolations and excesses which took place were based on oral and written orders issued by that central body.”

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Talaat, who was sentenced to death, was living peacefully as a private citizen in Germany, which rejected Allied demands for extradition. Conscious of his place in history, Talaat had begun writing his memoirs. In them he downplayed the scale of the violence and argued that any abuses (referred to mainly in the passive voice) were fairly typical if “regrettable” features of war, carried out by “uncontrolled elements.” “I confess,” he wrote, “that the deportation was not carried out lawfully everywhere…Some of the officials abused their authority, and in many places people took the preventive measures into their own hands and innocent people were molested.”Acknowledging it was the government’s duty to prevent and punish “these abuses and atrocities,” he explained that doing so would have aroused great popular “discontent,” and Turkey could not afford to be divided during war. “We did all we could,” he claimed, “but we preferred to postpone the solution of our internal difficulties until after the defeat of our external enemies.” Although other countries at war also enacted harsh “preventive measures,” he wrote, “the regrettable results were passed over in silence,”whereas “the echo of our acts was heard the world over, because everybody’s eyes were upon us.” Even as Talaat attempted to burnish his image, he could not help but blame the Armenians for their own fate. “I admit that we deported many Armenians from our eastern provinces,” he wrote, but “the responsibility for these acts falls first of all upon the deported people themselves.”

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After a promising start, enthusiasm for trying Talaat and his henchmen faded and politics quickly intervened. With the Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) rapidly gaining popularity at home, the Ottoman regime began to fear a backlash if it was seen to be succumbing to British designs. In addition, the execution of Kemal Bey had made him a martyr to nationalists around the empire. To avoid further unrest, the Turkish authorities began releasing low-level suspects. The British had grown frustrated by the incompetence and politicization of what they called the “farcical”Turkish judicial system. Fearing none of the suspects in Turkish custody would ever be tried, the British occupation forces shipped many of the arrested war crimes suspects from Turkey to Malta and Mudros, a port on the Aegean island of Lemnos, for eventual international trials. But support for this, too, evaporated. By 1920 the condemnations and promises of 1915 were five years old. Kemal, who was rapidly consolidating his control over Turkey, had denounced as treasonous the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which committed the Ottomans to surrender war crimes suspects to an international tribunal. The British clung for a time to the idea that they might at least prosecute the eight Turks in custody who had committed crimes against Britons. But Winston Churchill gave up even this hope in 1920 when Kemal seized twenty-nine British soldiers whose immediate fates Britain privileged above all else.

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In November 1921 Kemal put an end to the promise of an international tribunal by negotiating a prisoner swap. The incarcerated Britons were traded for all the Turkish suspects in British custody. In 1923 the European powers replaced the Treaty of Sèvres with the Treaty of Lausanne, which dropped all mention of prosecution. Former British prime minister David Lloyd George called the treaty an “abject, cowardly, and infamous surrender.”

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Chapter 2 “A Crime Without a Name” (#ulink_1dde91a2-4cb1-5613-a395-93a7803d35f4)

Soghomon Tehlirian, the young Armenian survivor, knew little of international treaties or geopolitics. He knew only that his life had been empty since the war, that Talaat was responsible, and that the former minister of the interior would never stand trial. Since the massacre of his family and injury to his head, Tehlirian had been unable to sleep and had been overcome by frequent epileptic seizures. In 1920 he had found a cause, enlisting in Operation Nemesis, a Boston-based Armenian plot to assassinate the Turkish leaders involved in targeting the Armenians. He was assigned to murder Talaat, a crime that earned him everlasting glory in the Armenian community and brief global notoriety.

While Tehlirian awaited trial in Berlin, Raphael Lemkin, a twenty-one-year-old Polish Jew studying linguistics at the University of Lvov, came upon a short news item on Talaat’s assassination in the local paper. Lemkin was intrigued and brought the case to the attention of one of his professors. Lemkin asked why the Armenians did not have Talaat arrested for the massacre. The professor said there was no law under which he could be arrested. “Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens,” he said. “He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing.”